An (Updated) Career Desire History

An (Updated) Career Desire History

Earlier this year, I wrote a few posts talking about searching for — and ultimately finding a new job. I originally had written this post as an extension of those posts, meant to go up in May of this year. But that never happened. So I’m putting it up now.

The main idea for the post below came from a post I wrote in the summer of 2013, wherein I discussed my career aspirations throughout life as a response to a blog post that did the same1Said blog is apparently now dead, as the domain is up for sale.. I’ve kept most of what I wrote on the original post, which accounts for about 800 words of this article, though I have added to that content to help it make more sense here and there2Such as footnotes like these.. I’ve also updated the post to include more information about how my career aspirations have changed since 2013…not that it’s happened at all or anything.

Age ??? – Second Grade – A professional wrestler AND a football player

As a young boy, I fell into the stereotype of wanting to grow up to be a professional athlete. Despite being the smallest kid in my class, I was convinced that being a wide receiver in the NFL was the optimal life choice I could make. My idol at the time was Brian Blades, a diminutive wideout for the Seattle Seahawks who put up four 1,000 yard seasons during his eleven years in the league. When I later played football in middle school, I wore the number 89 because of Blades3I was blissfully unaware that Blades was on trial for murdering his cousin, a charge he was later acquitted of.

At the same time, I was convinced I could also be a professional wrestler. I loved watching pro wrestling, particularly mesmerized by the acrobatics of Shawn Michaels4Oddly enough, my favorite childhood wrestlers — Edge and Christian — weren’t even the ones that first got me into wrestling. and the sheer power of The Undertaker. I even had a gimmick thought up for myself. My ring name was going to be The Jukebox Hero (blatantly lift from Foreigner’s song by the same name), and I’d be a musician who hit people with guitars as his finishing move (basically a tolerable version of Jeff Jarrett/The Honky Tonk Man).

Second Grade – Third Grade – A history teacher

My first experience with public school came midway through second grade, thanks in large part to my parents getting divorced. I was an incredibly shy child — the only two people I talked to in second grade were my homeroom teacher and the school counselor, with third grade not being much better — though I did find that I loved learning. My favorite subject of all was social studies, primarily because I was the only kid in class who could spell Czechoslovakia and knew that the former Cold War nation had dissolved in 1993. When the third grade class did a musical based off of careers, I was first in line to sign up for the part of being a teacher. My interest in actually teaching history didn’t stick around long, however.

Third Grade – Seventh Grade – Sports Statistician

Despite not having a television or internet in my house throughout most of my childhood, I was exposed to computers for the majority of that time. My dad had a Macintosh LC 520 that he used for work, though I mainly used it to play Monopoly and Spectre5It might have been Spectre VR that we had. I’m genuinely not sure at this point.. After he replaced the LC 520 with a new computer, I got the old desktop and started fiddling around with some of its other programs. A spreadsheet program caught my eye, and from there forward I routinely started keeping statistics from kickball and football games that my cousins, my brother, and I would play after school. To this day, I still think it would be pretty cool to work for the Elias Sports Bureau, though I’m content with not working there as well.

Seventh Grade – Ninth Grade – Anaylst

I had no clue what I wanted to analyze, I just knew that I wanted to analyze things. Most of the time, my desire to be an analyst fell into the realm of watching for changes in stocks and bonds, or attempting to forecast future athlete performance based off of past trends. Had Bill Barnwell, Jayson Stark, or Matthew Berry’s writing been easily available to me in middle school, I’m fairly certain my career path desires wouldn’t have changed. The start of high school signaled my next change in career choices, all prompted by a sudden increase in my skill level of something I did every day.

Ninth Grade – Early Senior Year – Jazz Trumpeter or High School Music Teacher

I started playing the trumpet (very poorly) in the fifth grade. For the first four years I played, I was horrible at the trumpet. I really wanted to get better, and I’d try to practice when I could, however my stepmom was pissed off I didn’t choose a manlier instrument like the drums6She also told me I had a vagina and that “I might as well get gay married” when I told her I didn’t want to play football anymore., so I wasn’t allowed to practice at home. My dad divorced my first stepmom midway through my eighth grade year, and I began practicing trumpet every day at home7My dad was a trumpeter himself, so he didn’t mind..

In less than a year, I went from being 14th chair (out of 15 trumpet players) to 4th chair of all grade levels (1st in my class). The emotional and ego boost of succeeding made me strongly considering going into music for a career for a couple of years, though soon enough my desire to work in sports would resurface.

Early Senior Year – My Final Semester Of Undergraduate College – Sports Radio Talk Show Host

At one point, I wanted to be a journalist. Well, more accurately, I got pissed off at how certain members of my high school’s staff had a shitfit when I told them I didn’t want to work in science for the rest of my life, and it caused me to go even harder towards considering journalism or broadcast media in college. Though the more I look back at my decision to go to school for communications, the more I think it was a ploy for me to get out of the house and get a college degree more so than what I actually wanted to do. Don’t get me wrong, I loved working at a radio station in college, however the longer I talked about sports, the more I realized it wasn’t a viable career path thanks to my strong distaste for anything baseball or basketball related. Fortunately, a class during my final year of my undergraduate degree changed my career direction.

Last Semester at State Tech – Mid 2015 – Curriculum Designer

In my final semester working on my communications degree, I took a filler class to get my course load to a full-time schedule. The class was meant for upperclassmen to teach incoming freshmen how to deal with the stresses of college, including everything from study habits to handling alcohol (seriously). Each of the four upperclassmen was responsible for creating lesson plans for two classes across the semester (in addition to the class sessions created by the graduate assistant teaching the class), then they would teach the content they created. I found that I loved creating lesson plans, going so far as to go to grad school a year later with the intent of learning to develop curricula for college students.

While I no longer work in higher education, I still have a passion for creating plans to help individuals learn and grow within their fields. The problem isn’t that I dislike doing curriculum development. It’s that it’s not all I want to do for the rest of my life. I actually got to be a curriculum designer as a component of my job from mid-2014 to mid-2018. And it’s enjoyable under the right circumstances. In designing curriculum for various departments in the company I worked for, I began to realize that there was something I wanted to do even more.

Something changed in 2015. I can’t quite put my finger on what it was, but something made me have a drastic change in desire of how I wanted to make a living. A few of my friends began to share that they thought my writing was good. Really good. To the point where I should take one of my NaNoWriMo stories and turn it into a book. I did something along those lines in 2016, publishing a book of short stories I’ve written. That said, I’m still working toward getting my first novel done. I’m hoping that to have it in decent shape by the end of 2018.

As for those changes to my career desires thanks to my job I mentioned? All of the training I created helped me to realize that most of the things I had an interest in fell under the realm of human resources. So I started doing everything I could to point my career in that direction. In recent posts, I’ve covered why this hasn’t worked out so far. That said, with a new start, I’m hoping my career trajectory begins to take me that way.

What are some of the jobs you’ve wanted in your past? Do you have any career desires that you look back on now as being silly or amusing? Share them in the comments.

4 thoughts on “An (Updated) Career Desire History”

I don’t think I knew that an Analyst was even a thing at that age! I feel like your career aspirations were generally more realistic than mine. A few of mine: vet, actor, singer (this would be bad for everyone), publicist, and, of course, writer.

I didn’t have delusions that I could sing until I was an adult. Those delusions quickly went away once I was in a band (briefly) and realized that unless a song was in my very narrow wheelhouse, I sounded terrible.

And yeah…I was a strange kid. One of my favorite movies when I was 12-14 was The Truman Show. Which is a super adult, dystopian thing to enjoy. But apparently I was just weird.

I mostly wanted to be a teacher or a writer or a librarian. I think I must have always had a pretty good sense of who I was, even if it didn’t seem like it. But I also wanted to be the president when I was in second grade. Should’ve followed through on that one lol

I definitely had no idea who I was for a good portion of my life. Granted, that’s completely aside from what I wanted to do for a living, but I think that’s somewhat representative of my other struggles with who I am too.